


Monsters in the Closet

by DracoMaleficium



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Depression, Future Fic, M/M, Oneshot, Some Comfort At The End
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2017-06-28
Packaged: 2018-11-20 16:19:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11338995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DracoMaleficium/pseuds/DracoMaleficium
Summary: Gotham City hasn't needed Batman for over 15 years.





	Monsters in the Closet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [robatics (synthwave)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/synthwave/gifts).



> HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ROBATICS, HERE'S SOME ANGST
> 
> Inspired by "Legends of the Dark Knight" #33 (2013) which is a cruel cruel comic, it's an old idea that me and Mitzvah brainstormed about one night and that I could never quite let go.
> 
> Warning: sads ahead.

“Wake up, darling. It’s time.”

Bruce opens his eyes, and immediately closes them again. The sun is low in the sky and barely struggling through the protective sheen of clouds and pollution but it’s still far too bright, and he groans, turning his back on it and pressing his face into the pillow.

“Come now, sweetie. Don’t make me drag you. You know I will.” 

The voice is quiet and warm, warmer than the midafternoon sun. Amused, and fond. Close and yet too far, hovering somewhere by the dresser, punctuated by familiar clangs and pats of makeup items being picked up, used and then put back with all the efficiency born out of years of routine. The voice is humming now, a Sinatra classic, slightly breathy and out of tune. 

“I know I said I’ll let you sleep in today but if you don’t start getting ready we’ll be late and they won’t let you live it down, you know they won’t.”

“Late,” Bruce mumbles into the pillow. “Late for…”

“Oh, only the wedding,” the voice chides him, openly amused now. “Your son’s wedding, you know, the one you’ve been preparing a speech for for weeks? That wedding?”

The wedding, Bruce repeats silently. Oh, yes, yes of course. The wedding. Naturally. Dick’s, or was it Tim’s, or maybe Damian’s? Not Jason’s. Jason wouldn’t invite him. He stopped coming to Gotham after… after…

Bruce opens his eyes and sits up to regard the figure sat by the dresser. 

He’s humming, still, as he combs his sleek green hair neatly to the side. His long neck swans this way and that, the white tux stretching taut over his shoulders. He’s wearing gloves already, lilac satin, and Bruce can catch a glimpse of his face in the mirror, just a tease of it, a sharp cheekbone, the tilted corner of a red red smile. 

The man turns to him. “Hello there, beautiful,” he says, eyes gleaming. “Come here often?”

Bruce feels warm, and lets the warmth spell over his mouth. He slides out of bed and stands in the still air, and realizes, with a strange numb sense of detachment, that he’s completely naked. 

He doesn’t mind. The man in the chair doesn’t seem to mind either, nor is he surprised. He looks at Bruce with easy familiarity, and then turns back to the dresser, picking up a tube of lipstick.

“That was terrible,” Bruce finds himself saying. He takes a step towards the dresser.

“No more terrible than my other pick up lines,” the man tells him distractedly. He pauses to draw the lipstick over his mouth, carefully, and then rubs his lips together to even it out. “So what does it say about the man they actually work on?”

“That he’s an idiot?” Bruce guesses, smiling, coming closer still.

The man hums agreement, smiling at Bruce in the mirror. “Well, obviously. And he’s about to be a very late idiot if he doesn’t stop staring at me like that and actually gets in the shower. More rouge? Or would that be too Lady Gaga, what do you think?”

“I think it’s perfect,” Bruce tells him. Then he catches the glint of a golden ring suspended off a fine silver chain at the man’s throat, reflected in the mirror just under the purple bowtie, and he swallows. “I think you’re perfect.”

He’s standing behind the man’s chair now. He reaches out to put his hands on his shoulders. 

The man turns, and smiles at him warmly with love draped all over his green, green eyes. 

“Wake up,” he says, and when Bruce tries to touch him his hands go through air. 

He opens his eyes. 

The room around him is dark and still, and only lights from the streets are playing tag with the shadows over the ceiling.

He lies there in the darkness, staring, breathing, he doesn’t know how long. 

And then he sits up and tries not to look at the place where, in the dream, the dresser stood. 

He gets himself water. He puts his bathrobe on and walks out onto the balcony, barefoot.

He sits there staring at the city at his feet until his eyes run out of tears to spill, waiting for a signal he knows won’t come.

 

***

 

In the morning, he goes for a run in the park. He gets breakfast in the little diner on the way. He exchanges quiet greetings with his neighbors out on their way to work or to school or walking their dogs, goes for a brisk shower and then spends some time in the library, reading and taking notes and solving puzzles he promised himself he wouldn’t touch. 

It’s okay. It’s not like he’ll actually go out and do anything about them, save for maybe slipping an envelope with the notes at the Police station. There’s loopholes to every deal and he’s always been good at leaving himself a way out. 

It’s just an exercise. Just an exercise. Old people need their mental exercises, that’s what they keep telling him. 

Later he goes to the riverside, and sits on a bench in the sunshine watching the people pass him by. 

He pretends that the peace and quiet don’t make everything inside him crawl, and he does his best not to think about the dream.

And then he thinks about it anyway, and his shoulders hunch, and his eyes drop to the ground. 

He doesn’t move until the sun finally starts to sink, casting the sky over the city that is no longer his in a storm of orange and red. 

Then he walks along the riverbank until his feet go sore, and then he walks some more, and only retreats to the still, empty apartment when it starts to feel like the night itself wants to push him out. 

 

***

 

“We’re worried about you,” says one of the figures hovering by his balcony, and another says, “Won’t you let us in?”

He does, eventually — reluctantly — and takes up the armchair while the two of them, both beautiful, both young in a way that has nothing to do with age, both strong and powerful and concerned, perch on a couch across from him.

He makes them tea, which they accept, and they never comment that it’s not as good as Alfred’s used to be. 

“How are you doing?” Diana asks, setting her cup down. 

“Fine.” The first lie.

“Are you still seeing your therapist?” Clark wants to know.

“Yeah.” Second lie.

“Do you… need anything?”

“No.” Third lie, or half of one, anyway. He doesn’t need anything from _them_.

“We heard about Two… About Harvey,” Clark says. “I’m very sorry, Bruce.”

“No you’re not.”

“We know he used to be a friend,” Diana tries, gently, like he’s a scared animal caught in the headlights, one of the monsters she’s so fond of taming. “It’s okay to feel grief at a time like this, Bruce. We thought maybe… maybe you’d like to talk about it?”

He snorts at that, and turns away from them.

He catches them looking at one another, and then Clark says, “Right. Wishful thinking, I know. But if you do need anything, we’re… here for you. Okay? Just because you’re not wearing the cowl anymore doesn’t mean…”

“I’m tired,” Bruce tells them, and there are no more words to be said after that.

Diana does turn to him just before she and Clark fly away. Her face is that of someone unsure about their right to ask, but who is going to ask anyway.

“Have you tried getting in touch with Dick, or any of the others? They’re out there, Bruce. They’re your family. I’m sure that if you just tried, if you reached out, they’d —”

He looks at her, and eventually, she trails off. She nods, and her face is cast in sorrow he has no patience for.

“Goodbye,” she says, and then they both disappear over the skyline. 

 

***

 

He has the dream again that night, and then the next, and the next.

On the fourth day he tries to stop a mugger from stealing a woman’s purse only for her to scream at him that it’s her husband, there hasn’t been a mugging here in fifteen years, what the hell is wrong with you, you creep?!

He stands there staring after them as they hurry away from him, and when he finally finds himself back in the apartment that evening, he leans over the bathroom sink and stares into the mirror until it tells him what to do.

His hand hovers over the razor blade, only for a moment. Then it drops, and he turns away. 

He starts to get ready.

 

***

 

“It’s time, old friend,” he tells the gravestone, which watches him silently as the person lying beneath it used to do every day, every night for most of his life. “I’m sorry, but it is. I can’t stay here. He’s done his job and now the city doesn’t need him anymore, it doesn’t need _us_ , but I still… I still have one more thing to do.”

He touches the gravestone, the way he let himself touch the person far too rarely while he still could. 

“I hope you’ll understand,” he whispers. “I’m not leaving _you._ I just… I can’t.”

There’s a rustle, the wind agitating the crown of leaves over his head. He looks up and breathes it in. 

He smiles at the name on the gravestone. 

“Thank you, Alfred.”

 

***

 

It’s far too easy to get into Arkham, easier than it used to be even when he was in his prime and his name still rang over the halls in fear. 

That’s understandable. The worst demons they keep in here have lost their fangs years ago.

He doesn’t wait for lights out. As long as he carries a mop and a bucket and looks like he knows where he’s going nobody pays attention to the quiet bearded janitor, the way people by the river never paid attention to the strange old man feeding the pigeons day after day. He knows how to blend in when he wants to, and he knows the path to each cell by heart.

This one especially.

“Joker,” he says, speaking through the bars in the door. 

Inside, in the darkness, something stirs. Something rustles. There’s the soft slide of bare feet on a padded floor. 

A thin, bony white finger touches the bars. The fingernail has dirt under it and is bitten almost to the quick.

“Is it time?” the creature inside asks in a voice that sounds like he hasn’t used it in years. Maybe he hasn’t. Bruce feels like he’s barely used his.

He nods. “Yeah. You ready?”

“Always.”

He peers into the darkness, into eyes he can barely see. 

He nods. “All right.”

Once they get Joker into the change of clothes Bruce has smuggled inside for him it’s almost laughably easy to guide him outside, in broad daylight, through busy corridors. No one stops them. No one even thinks to. In the oversized sweater and jacket, with the baseball hat over his head, Joker looks almost like any other visitor, and the two of them walk out of Arkham and to the bus stop in silence that never needs to be interrupted. 

On the bus, Joker leans his head on Bruce’s shoulder, and though Bruce doesn’t quite put his arm around him he doesn’t move to shrug him away.

They pack up what little they have — what little they need — and get on the Greyhound to New York that same night. Neither of them sleeps but nor do they speak, and simply watch the night swim by light after light after light, leaving behind a city that has outgrown the monsters in her closet.

And once again, Joker’s head rests on Bruce’s shoulder. 

Two hours into the ride Bruce lets his head rest on his.


End file.
